How to boost your traffic with “Related Posts”

Jetpack’s Related Posts feature scans all of the posts on your site (or blog), analyzes them, and shows your visitors other posts with related content that they might be interested in reading once they’re done reading the one that brought them to your site.

Most sites who activate this see an increase in traffic. On this site, Jetpack.me, when we compare pages with and without the feature enabled we see around 79% more visitors clicking through to one other post on the site.

This data is based on a 6-month traffic comparison between blog posts showing related posts and pages with the feature disabled. Turning on the feature for us in essence means that almost twice as many visitors read something else besides the original post that brought them here.

How does it work?

The related content is automatically generated based on the content of the post and any tags or categories if they exist. Unlike many other related post plugins, we do all the analysis, processing, and serving from our cloud, so there is no additional load on your server. (That’s why many plugins like YARPP or Similar Posts are often banned by web hosts, but Jetpack Related Posts are allowed.)

This is not unlike other Jetpack features like Photon and Stats that rely on our cloud infrastructure for the heavy lifting.

Once its enabled (and if you have more than 10 posts in total on your site) the related posts will show up in a “Related Posts” section just below your main post content, very much like what you can see at the bottom of this post 🙂

How to enable it

Once this is done, go to the Jetpack page in your blog’s dashboard and click the Activate button for Related Posts. You can also customize how the related posts section looks by going to your Settings → Reading page and scrolling down to the options next to “Related posts.”

Comments

Thank you for the great post.
I’ve enabled Jetpack related posts on my blogs, and I am happy with the result.
They always seem to show *actual* related posts, however, when a new post comes up, the related posts do not seem to load for a while.

What is the expected time until the processing of “Related posts” is complete?

I just put this in, and I really like it, but I don’t like where it automatically put it on my blog. I was hoping it would show up like a widget and let me put it with the other widgets. I don’t know much about coding or programming, but is there an easy way to tell it where to go?

Hi there, unfortunately it’s not possible to do that without a fair amount of programming knowledge, however its a good suggestion and I’ll add it to our list of issues to consider on GitHub. The reason it was designed in this way however is that generally speaking it’s more likely someone will be interested in a related post once they’re done reading the one they’re currently on so being at the bottom of the post it hopefully flows a bit more naturally with the reading experience.

I’ve enabled this feature, but the posts it’s showing are not related in any way. For example, on my recent ‘travel diary’ post I’d expect other ‘travel diary’ posts to show (same category) but it shows something completely random. Same for all other posts, not sure what it’s reading from, as it doesn’t seem to be tags or category.

Hi Rhi, its not based solely on tags/categories. It primarily looks at the post’s content and title for keywords. Can you perhaps point me to an example of a post where you feel its not showing the best related posts on your site?

I really like this module. I think it would be even better with two enhancements:

1. Turn it into “Related Posts & Pages”, with site owners able to choose which type to include in results (pages, posts, or both).
2. Include the results on pages as well as posts. Again, give site owners the choice.

I have downloaded Jetpack again and again but it doesn’t work on my blog neelkanth.blogspot.com. Shall be thankful if please let me know if Jetpack is meant for WordPress.org only or it can function on my free blog at WordPress.com as given above.

Hi there, so first of all, Jetpack will only work with WordPress.org as you say. When you are on WordPress.com you automatically get all the Jetpack features without needing to install anything additional.

However, the site you’ve posted above – neelkanth.blogspost.com – is not a WordPress site! It is a “Blogger.com” site which is not affiliated in any way at all to WordPress.

Are you interested in migrating to WordPress? If so I can perhaps point you in the right direction for making that process as smooth as possible.

I am bountifully thankful to you for your quick reply. I am sorry having given you a wrong site. My site is actually neelkanth.wordpress.com with a link uppermost.me. I am interested that all plugins should be functional on my site.

Ah got it. In that case my previous comment applies: since your site is hosted by us on WordPress.com you already have access by default to the Jetpack features and, unlike a self-hosted WordPress.org site, it is not possible to install custom plugins yourself.